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Blaxploitation Star Lockhart Dies
The year was 1970. The movie was Cotton Comes to Harlem. The actor was Calvin Lockhart. The question was: "Am I black enough for you?"
The answer would change Hollywood.
Lockhart, the charismatic Cotton Comes to Harlem star, and one of the blaxploitation era's most promising leading men, died Mar. 29 in his native Bahamas of complications from a stroke, reports said. He was 72.
News of Lockhart's death didn't make it into the U.S. press until this past weekend. Like many black stars of the 1970s, Lockhart found the ride from fame to obscurity breathtakingly fast and decidedly one-way.
"I don't know why he was not more utilized because he was so good," Sidney Poitier said of Lockhart to the Los Angeles Times.
Poitier, the Oscar-winning legend and pioneering black actor to whom an up-and-coming Lockhart was compared, directed the younger man in two action-comedies: 1974's Uptown Saturday Night, and its spiritual, if not actual sequel, 1975's Let's Do It Again.
The latter film saw Lockhart play a character named Biggie Smalls, one of the monikers later adopted by the rapper Notorious B.I.G.
B.I.G.'s allegiances aside, Lockhart's most influential movie was Cotton Comes to Harlem. Starring a predominantly black cast, including Godfrey Cambridge, and helmed by a black director, Ossie Davis, Cotton "proved once and for all," Life magazine judged in 1970, "that movies do not have to be lily-white—or even 'integrated'—to be big box office."
Along with Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, released in 1971, Cotton encouraged Hollywood to open its wallets to a new kind of film and audience. The blaxploitation era, and all the Shafts, Macks, and Foxy Browns that comprised it, ensued.
The stage-trained Lockhart held court in Cotton as a corrupt, cape-clad preacher whose missing slush fund sets the story in motion. Weeks before the film's release, the New York Times was already on the case, declaring the actor "a beautiful man."
The same year, Lockhart encouraged Poitier comparisons in Halls of Anger, about a quietly strong vice principal who tries to keep bussed-in white kids, including the young Jeff Bridges and the skinnier Rob Reiner, from getting pushed around at a predominantly black high school.
But after a flop with 1972's Melinda, the most prototypical blaxploitation film on Lockhart's résumé, the ride was coming to an end. At least in Hollywood. By the mid-1970s, Lockhart was in England, performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
"Calvin felt that he wanted to be somewhere where skin color didn't matter, where he could do his craft freely, on a high level," Jennifer Miles-Lockhart, his fourth and last wife, told Jamaica's Freeport News.
Born Bert Cooper in 1934 in the Bahamas, the future movie star moved to New York to pursue engineering studies, per an old studio bio, but ended up on Broadway in the 1960 play The Cool World. He scored his film breakthrough in the 1968 interracial drama, Joanna.
While Lockhart's star failed to rise as expected, it didn't entirely disappear. It rated him a stint as Diahann Carroll's love interest on TV's Dynasty in the mid-1980s, and, later, per Internet Movie Database credits, scored him bits in movies such as Coming to America, Wild at Heart and Predator 2.
"Calvin had wonderful range as an actor," Poitier told the Times. "He really had such enormous promise."
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